Edward Hall, Expert on Nonverbal Communication, Is Dead at 95

By WILLIAM GRIMES

Published: August 4, 2009

Edward T. Hall, a cultural anthropologist who pioneered the study of nonverbal communication and interactions between members of different ethnic groups, died July 20 at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 95.

Skip to next paragraphThe death was confirmed by his wife, Karin Bergh Hall.

Mr. Hall first became interested in space and time as forms of cultural expression while working on Navajo and Hopi reservations in the 1930s. He later developed a cultural model that emphasized the importance of nonverbal signals and modes of awareness over explicit messages. These insights proved invaluable in studying how members of different cultures interact and how they often fail to understand one other.

Edward Twitchell Hall, known as Ned, was born in Webster Groves, Mo., and grew up in Santa Fe. He earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of Denver in 1936, a master’s degree from the University of Arizona in 1938 and a doctorate fromColumbia University in 1942.

While serving with the Army Corps of Engineers during World War II, he commanded a black regiment in Europe and in the Philippines. In 1946, he married Mildred E. Reed, who died in 1994. An earlier marriage ended in divorce. In addition to Karin Bergh Hall, whom he married in 2004, he is survived by a son, Eric R. Hall of Albuquerque; a sister, Priscilla Waters Norton of Connecticut; and a grandson.

After teaching anthropology at the University of Denver and Bennington College in Vermont, Mr. Hall directed a program for the Foreign Service Institute in Washington designed to help State Department employees negotiate cultural differences when they took on overseas assignments.

At the same time, he carried out research at the Washington School of Psychiatry that led to his most influential book, “The Silent Language” (1959), which outlined his theory of explicit versus informal forms of communication.

“One example he always gave was the way that married couples do not need to say much to know how the other is feeling,” said Gladys Levis-Pilz, a former research assistant to Mr. Hall at Northwestern University. “By looking at each other’s faces or reading each other’s gestures, they can instantly get more information than they could from explicit statements.”

A more complex example, Ms. Levis-Pilz said, might be the mechanics of driving a car as cultural expression. On the explicit level, drivers understand the working of a car, the highway system and the written rules of the road. Informally, they know that some drivers run red lights and, if they live in New Jersey, that one must often turn right to go left on a state road because of the jughandle system.

Some of Mr. Hall’s most provocative ideas, developed when he was at the Illinois Institute of Technology in the 1960s, dealt with cultural attitudes toward space and time as part of the informal realm of communication. Those ideas form the substance of his books “The Hidden Dimension” (1966) and “The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time” (1983).

Space as a form of communication, a field he dubbed proxemics, embraced phenomena like territoriality among office workers and the cultural meanings of architecture. The use of time as a form of communication can be seen, he argued, in the executive or the movie star who keeps a client waiting for a precisely calibrated number of minutes. His ideas were synthesized in “Beyond Culture” (1976).

After retiring from Northwestern, where he taught from 1967 to 1977, Mr. Hall lectured widely on interethnic and intercultural relations. With his wife Mildred, he wrote “Hidden Differences: How to Communicate with the Germans” (1983), “Hidden Differences: Doing Business with the Japanese” (1987) and “Understanding Cultural Differences: Germans, French and Americans” (1990).

In 1992, he published a memoir, “An Anthropology of Everyday Life.”